November 2015 Review

The Blogger app just crashed and lost this 80% written post, so as I'm now annoyed the rewritten version will be shorter. I really need a laptop. Dates in bold. 

1. Hung out at Ben's photoshoot for the play he's doing. 

4. Went to Web Summit. Had banter with Gabi, Thomas, Catrina, Niamh, Johnny, Ciara, Selina and Campbell. 

7. Spoke on a STEMettes panel about my experiences in STEM. It was great getting to meet all the other awesome speakers, see the STEMettes again and hang out with Alice. Here's a picture of Alice and I being fabulously matching and the best of buds. 

Alice and I went to DCU so I could catch the end of Engineering, where I saw Gabi. 

After that, Alice's nan treated us to Burger King and we were dorks. 

8. Studied with Chloe, then slept over at hers. Was cool but getting a bus in the dark at 6.17, followed by the first train, was weird. 

13. Had a tremendously lovely sleepover with Ben. 

14. Breakfast in town with Ben, then went to the Trinity Maths Physics Open Day on the spur of the moment and saw Gabi, Chloe, Jerry, PJ, James and others, then to Burger King (so much BK) where I saw Mai, John Joe, Thomas and Gillespie. 

18. Choir competition in a local concert hall. My choir came second in our category and the other choir from my school came first in theirs. Fun. 

19. Honours Irish students from my school went to Ballymun to see An Triail in theatre. Pretty good show, although I couldn't get into the right frame of mind to understand Irish for the first part. Oops. 

25. Met Jackson through Ben while on a sick day from school (my fourth sick day ever, I think - something like that). He's hella cool, so that was serendipitous. It's fab when you click with someone. Less fab when they live in a different country. 

28. Braved the horrific weather to meet Gabi outside Trinity then go to DCU for Engineering, where we learned some Java. Then met up with Jack and watched Gabi's musical, which was fantastic and left me feeling perhaps oversympathetic to the villain. We then slept over at Gabi's. 

29. Hung out with Ben, then came home and tried to do some homework. 

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Again, this month was great socially and grand schoolwise, but I want to get something cool going so look out for that. 

 

Web Summit 2015

Hey guys!

Last week I was given the chance to go to the last Web Summit before the event moves to Lisbon by Ciara Judge (this is yo shoutout), who was presenting an ALPHA-stage startup with Gabi and Campbell and Selina from Texas.

Upon arriving in the general area of the Web Summit, before I even got inside a building, I was given a free tshirt by some company who I'd be able to promo if I hadn't immediately lost the t-shirt. The free stuff was to continue, though, fortunately. 

When I finally figured out how to navigate this setup of the RDS (BTYSTE flashbacks), I was reunited with Gabi (who's Chief Ambassador Liaison and Social Media Director for the startup, Project Zilkr and also meme queen of CTY and Outbox) and met Selina and Campbell for the first time. It's crazy to think they came all the way from Texas for a few days here. I actually bumped into Campbell later that week, at my panel. They're hella cool. 

I spent most of the day at the Zilkr stand (really should've gone to some talks) but did some exploring (getting free stuff, mostly) and saw people from lots of things I've done this year - Johnny from BT Business Bootcamp, Gabi and Thomas from CTYI, Niamh, Ciara, Catrina and Gabi from Outbox and some DYC people from InspireFest. It's really cool bumping into people everywhere - I can hardly go to Dublin  anymore without seeing at least two people I know there out and about. 

The atmosphere at Web Summit was strange - I preferred InspireFest's, then Evolve Biomed's. Maybe it was too reminiscent of Young Scientist or loud. The arena/stage part was cool though, and had wifi that actually worked. 

I got a little lost heading back to the train from the RDS in the dark, ended up sprinting and missing my train by about twenty seconds (literally watched it pull away from the opposite platform). Luckily there was a train I could get three minutes later that would connect via an intermediate stop to where I wanted to go, but without much leeway (leetime?), so I improvised. Why do I feel compelled to update my blog readers on my train misadventures? Very good question. 

Free stuff:

I'm very glad I got the opportunity to go - it was a fun day and will no doubt lead to opportunities in some form or another. Hell yeah.